


one too many mornings

by curlymcclain



Series: corrina, corrina [2]
Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Boris POV, Fix-It, Lots of Angst, M/M, part two!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-20
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-13 12:48:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21494554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curlymcclain/pseuds/curlymcclain
Summary: Blisters have begun to form on my hand from gripping the bag's strap too tightly. The sign is in gold, just four steps in front of me. The hard part should be over- leaving my father, taking the bus, finding my way here- but the stairs leading to the golden letters seem impossible to climb. The concrete below my feet has a magnetic pull, dragging me down into the earth.What is he doing in there, so close I feel I’m breathing again into his neck? He could be having a nice night with the old man, one I will undoubtedly ruin. Or perhaps he’s miserable, and the sight of me will set him over the edge. I still see the most likely outcome being the painting promptly ripped out of my hands and a door slamming in my face. I gnaw at my thumbnail, my leg trembling, wanting to bounce up and down in my shoe. Just go in. Just go in.Quickly, so I don’t have time to stop myself, I run up the steps and start rapping at the door.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Series: corrina, corrina [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1540243
Comments: 68
Kudos: 464





	one too many mornings

**Author's Note:**

> from the crossroads of my doorstep  
my eyes, they start to fade  
and i turn my head back to the room  
where my love and i have laid  
and i gaze back to the street  
the sidewalk and the sign  
and i'm one too many mornings  
and a thousand miles behind

I remember where I was when it happened, actually.

I had been in Alaska for a month, desperate for something to do. I’d realized almost as soon as the rickety plane landed that this place was not for me. As soon as I saw the gray: gray everywhere. The buildings, the streets, the air, even the people seemed to give off a distinct air of cold dankness and pallor. It was everything New Guinea was not, and everything I’d been trying to avoid. I felt my life was already colorless as it was, it didn’t need the help of this small, stinky town. (That was the other thing- everything, always, smelled like fish.)

It reminded me of Ukraine, a little, except somehow there was even less going on. The Internet connection was shitty, which was good, because it was my only schooling. But at least school would occupy my time. On most days the computer didn’t work, and I sat in my room, reading the same books over and over again. We had a television, but it only carried a few stations and the picture was terrible, not even in color, as if we lived in a much earlier time along with the rest of the hicks who lived there.

There was a much better television down the road, at the town’s only diner. And that is where I was that day.

I hadn’t made a good first impression on the staff, when I’d come in a few weeks before and left without paying. Nor a good second impression, since I’d had to be kicked off the front patio for sitting and smoking all day without buying anything (and then snorting in the manager’s face: _You people call this a patio?_). Usually I was polite to adults, especially those that could give me a place to spend time away from home, but I was so dismayed from having to leave New Guinea, and so weighted down by the bleakness of the town, that I didn't much care. I didn’t like them, they didn’t like me.

That morning, though, I had money. I’d come into it two nights before, when I’d been playing music loudly in my bedroom, thinking my father wouldn’t be home until much later. But he’d decided, for the first time maybe since my mother died, to come home early. He had _guests_ with him- two bored looking women who he abandoned in the hallway so he could charge toward my room.

(Odd- in the moment before the door slammed behind him, one of them caught my eye. Something passed between us then, a flicker of recognition. She knew what was about to happen, and I knew she knew, and we both agreed she would do nothing to stop it, that I’d just get over it later with no one else around. And all I felt, in the split second before she was out of view, was profound embarrassment that she’d seen me at all.)

The next morning he saw the dark bruise on my neck and all but fell over at my feet. _You know I love you. This hurts me to see, Borya, it hurts me more than it could ever hurt you, you understand? _

I think he is wrong about that.

Either way, he left me with forty dollars and fucked off to the mine again, so I took myself out to breakfast.

The woman behind the counter spotted it as soon as I walked into the diner that morning. She- the very same woman who’d halfheartedly chased after me the morning I’d eaten and ditched- normally had no patience for me, but I knew it wasn’t easy to explain away a bruise like this. Maybe, I thought to myself, I would tell her I have a thing for being choked, just to see the look on her face. Me and my girl got a little carried away, you understand. Wink at her.

But I said nothing as I sat opposite her. I blinked and thought I could feel my head slamming again against the wall. The dull _thud_ of my skull had knocked loose a postcard I’d taped up. Alice Springs Welcomes You!

“You have money?” the waitress said flatly.

I stared at her for a moment, distracted (concussed, possibly) and fumbled for the cash in my pocket, palmed a few dollars onto the sticky counter. “Just checking,” she added, kinder already.

I ordered egg and toasts and had no idea my life was about to change, or that, in truth, it already had.

The television, small and fat, with two long antennae, sat at the end of the counter. It was supposed to be facing out towards where the customers sat, I think, but the waitresses always turned it around so they could watch as they poured coffee.

This woman, short and round with her hair pulled back too tight, had her eyes glued to it as she poured mine, black and certainly disgusting. I leaned forward over the counter to try and see what was so enthralling, but saw only a newsman at a desk, speaking silently with captions scrolling under him, obscuring the headline. 

I sat back down. My involvement with current events was completely dependent on where I was. When I was living in a normal civilization, I read newspapers and watched TV networks, and talked to whoever I could find who had something to say about it. But this bullshit town was like a different universe. If I tried (and I had tried) to engage someone there about anything- what they thought of their war criminal president, or the situation in Tibet- I was met with blank stares. This town was where the aliens lived, and they had no time for any of it. So why should I?

The waitress’ hand was shaking. She tore her eyes away from the television and back to me. “You okay?” she asked with a sigh. 

“Eh?”

“Looks like you got in a tussle.”

She pointed limply to my throat. 

“No,” I said quickly. “No, is nothing.” I cursed myself for not thinking of a real cover story, and only entertaining myself with a silly one. _Girlfriend, Boris? Really?_

She seemed, though, to take me at my word, or just not really care, because she looked back to the screen before I finished talking. 

I saw my breakfast being put up on the window behind her, the cook ringing the bell, followed by a loud, high pitched _ping_\- yet she had no reaction, like it hadn’t happened. I cleared my throat. I hadn’t eaten a meal in a few days, so looking up at the steaming plate, sitting there and getting cold, was already driving me a bit mad. I cleared my throat again.

She was staring strangely at the television, brow furrowed, clutching her hand to her chest. There was a very sad look in her eyes that I will always remember.

“Miss?” I said as nicely as I could.

I glanced behind her to the food. She looked at it, then at me, then back again before nearly jumping. “Sorry!” she chirped. “Sorry about that, bud.” Bud? She apologized a third time as she fetched it, which was unnecessary because she was feeding me, and at that point in my life there was not much I would hold over the heads of people who fed me.

As I devoured my breakfast- I was eating before she had the plate flat on the counter- I heard her sigh and say, “I’m just… I’m having a hard time this morning. I can’t believe it’s happening again.”

I glanced up from my toast; I must have looked completely blank, because she furrowed her eyebrows at me oddly. “New York,” she said, like I should know what that was supposed to mean.

“What about New York?” I muttered through a full mouth.

“Oh, Christ,” she said. She started a sentence a few times- “At the… There was…” - before choking up and turning the television towards me. She pressed the volume button until the newsman’s voice got so loud it had an echo that bounced around the small, open room.

_“... keeping you updated, but at this point, we don’t have a clear picture of how many have been injured.”_

The box at his shoulder showed an image of a large brown building with columns and a grand staircase that looked familiar, like maybe I had seen it in pictures. Police and medics were everywhere, swirling and shouting, faces blue and red in the vehicular glare. Below the picture, in white: TERROR IN MANHATTAN.

_“In case you’re just joining us, there has been an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. We don’t have a lot of information for you at this time, but we can say the blast occurred at around ten thirty Eastern time, and we’re getting word of casualties as they come. As of now there are ten confirmed dead and thirty one injured. Seventeen are in critical condition. Stay with us. We go now to our correspondent at the scene ….” _

We watched together as a woman in a brown trench coat stood with a microphone in front of the steps, clutching an umbrella against the rain._ “...We would like to emphasize to the public that there is no evidence at this time of Al-Qaeda’s involvement, nor of any….”_

I try now to think back on that day at the diner, and remember if I had been paying attention to the people running around behind her. I wonder if I had seen, pushing through the throng, a boy wearing glasses and covered in blood.

* * *

I slam the door shut behind me, which will probably get me in trouble, but I can’t find it within myself to care. The shiny hallway, lit in ugly white that reflects off the lockers, seems to go on forever in front of me. It’s getting longer by the second, the double doors we walked out of every day moving further and further away. A speck.

Today is my first day back at school since he left. He ran off on Thursday night, and I had skipped school the next day, deciding that I would be better off spending my time getting fucked up alone in my room and staring at walls. 

Over the weekend, I had made the mistake of looking at the painting, just once, and almost vomited from the wave of grief that crashed over me at the sight of it. Guilt and shame were new to me; the strangeness of my life had never allowed for them before. I’d once prided myself on living without regret, but now it feels like that’s all I am, like I’m made out of it, in all the places where I used to be made of skin and bone and blood.

I had basically run out of the house, then, and spent the next two nights partying with girls who were far too pretty for me, far too rich. (They clearly had no interest in my company, and just wanted in on Xandra’s stash, which I sold them at a preposterously low price. But I had to. It was that or sit alone in my room with his bird.)

It’s the same reason I came to school today, to avoid it. To think about anything else, which hasn’t been working, because I walked into English just now and sat at my desk and, without thinking, turned to say something to him.

_You will not believe what K.T. Bearman did to me._

The emptiness of his desk was creepy, like nothing in the world had ever been so empty as that. Like a black hole.

I forced myself to keep it together, even as my leg shook under the table and my tattered nails dug into my palms. But my restraint lasted about forty more seconds- because then Spirsetskaya was taking attendance, and his name was third, and no one answered her when she called for him. 

That was when I got up and ran out of the room.

I could go right now. I could say fuck it, and run the ten thousand kilometers that separate me and the double doors. I could rush home, grab all my shit and that fucking bird and find him, in New York, dressed nicely in shirts without holes and rubbing shoulders with mysterious redheads.

I take short, panicked breaths through my nose._ No, you could not do that, Boris. He does not want to see you._

I keep picturing it; him opening the newspaper and seeing the corner of the textbook, or my name, or Kotku’s. In the best case scenario, he hates me forever, and in the worst case.

I stop myself there, because in the worst case, he’s dead, and I don’t want to picture how.

I’ve lost my nerve and have stopped trying to text him. Better for both of us, I think, if we get used to the idea of never seeing each other again. Or at least better for me. I can be hated. I can miss people- I’m good at it; at least I usually am.

I sit heavily on the floor against the locker closest to me, all of my fight gone. A boy I sort of know, David or Dennis or something, walks slowly out of the door marked _Mrs. Spear_ in irritating construction paper orange. He looks down at me awkwardly.

“Um. She sent me to make sure you were okay.” 

I scoff. Only in America. “Am fine.”

“Do you need to go to, like, the nurse or something?”

“No.”

He nods, and the conversation should surely be over. I’m waiting for him to go away, but he sticks his hands in his pockets and takes a step closer to me.

“Hey, so. I heard you maybe knew where I could get some stuff?” he says.

I look up at him sharply. I don’t know how to react. Should I feel angry, because it ought to be clear to him that I am in the middle of some serious bullshit? Should I laugh at his stupid rich kid clothes and his lack of tact? _“Stuff.”_ Or maybe I should be marveling at how fast the word got out about my weekend at MGM Grand. If Theo were here he would roll his eyes and ignore the likes of this kid. If Theo were here-

I decide it is best to feel nothing at all.

“What kind of stuff?”

* * *

By Friday, things have gotten out of hand. Or they have by any normal sixteen year old standard- for me, I feel my life has improved. Suddenly, I’m popular, and rich, and I have excuses to be drunk and surrounded by people all the time. 

I look at the wad of cash in my hand- 456 dollars! In five days!- and figure that this is always where I was headed anyhow.

Tonight, I don’t know whose house I’m in, or really how I got here, but everyone is treating me like I’m Jesus come to rescue them. It must be one hell of an image: me setting up shop in a huge upstairs bedroom, surrounded by girls, people coming and going and leaving huge fucking gifts at my feet in exchange for almost nothing. I want so badly to look over at Theo and hear him laugh at me: _And the best thing is they have no idea what a prick you are._

_Exactly! _is probably what I’d say.

I should be happy, or at least be having fun. Hadn’t it been what I’d always wanted, to have people around? To have attention, admiration? Love? I suppose it would be beyond stupid to fool myself into thinking any of this is even close. 

No, I don’t believe my new friends care about me, but I don’t care about them either, so it all seems pretty fair. Still, I could at least try for fun, I think, as the edges of my vision blur. Under the influence of coke and what may have been six straight vodka shots, fun doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.

As the night goes on, though, it doesn’t come. My blurred sight starts to seem dangerous and disorienting, not comforting; the constantly shifting crowd becomes an evil, unwelcome mass, and not a collection of people wanting to pretend with me. The music pounds, nothing like the soft guitar I’ve grown so used to in the past year and a half, leaking into my head through one tangled earbud. The whole scene around me is too much, too sickeningly opposite to the life I’d fallen into, the life that was taken from me just seven days ago. 

How could it have been so recently? The harsh air conditioning of Theo’s house and the tangled mess of Popchyk’s fur are already slipping away from me when I try to recall them. 

A girl is talking to me- pretty, older than me, trying to flirt but I’m too far gone. I’m able to squint at her long enough to ask for the time. 2:04 AM. Basically still Thursday night. 

It has really been just one week.

* * *

Partying with Kotku is different from partying with the kids from school. She doesn’t go to house parties like the ones I’ve been frequenting lately- that’s for pussies, she says. She’s right, but I make money at them, so I keep going.

I’ve given up on school altogether; I show up for an hour or so every other morning just to keep tabs on who wants what, and to recruit new customers. Lurking in the hallways and avoiding teachers, hiding out in bathrooms. It might be easier to just attend my morning classes, but I’d rather hold my breath and stand up on a dirty toilet seat than face his empty desk again.

It’s been three weeks since he left, almost to the hour. (There’s no point in pretending that I’m not keeping track.)

Kotku walks out of the bathroom at the Double R, half stumbling, pointing at the open bottle on the counter. 

“And you’re good with all of those, right?” she asks.

“Eh?”

“Like, your prices are fixed and stuff.”

I rub my nose, perfectly content to do some more blow and leave it at that, but Kotku giggles at me. “You don’t even know what you’re selling, do you.”

Determined to prove myself, I stand and point. “No. No, I know them.” I’m more wasted than I thought. Biting down anxiously on my words, I sound like Theo on the street that night.

“Okay, what’s that one?” she pulls out a white bar with a long sparkly finger and presses it onto the table with a tiny _clack_.

“Xanax, tons of them in there,” I recite. “Selling them cheap to normal people, rich kids get a bar for fifty.”

“Well, what about this one?” She’s pulled out a tiny pill, green, unmarked. 

“Looks like maybe Adderall or something? Cough medicine, who knows,” I concede.

“But you’re gonna sell it?”

I shrug. “Dunno.”

“Definitely find out first, maybe it’s some really good shit. Like, maybe it’s worth a lot.”

I’m feeling the perfect blend of high, reckless, eager to please, and genuinely suicidal to see for myself. Kotku chuckles at me as I crush it up, and stops chuckling when it’s barely up my nose and everything goes silent- as if someone pulled the plug out of the world. And all I see is white. 

* * *

I get to the playground at least thirty seconds before he does. He announces his presence with a string of winded curses directed at me. “You had a head start.”

It’s late afternoon; the sky isn’t as wide open as usual, but full of low hanging clouds that move unnaturally fast. I stare up at them until he barks my name, pulling me back to earth.

“Wouldn’t worry about it, Potter,” I kick his shin lightly. “You can’t help being little. Like- what’s it called. Gulliver’s Travels. Tiny wee men.” 

He tries to stick his thumb in my eye.

Later, we lay back on the rusty merry-go-round, the bottle of vodka we’ve been stretching out over weeks almost empty. The sky looks even stranger than before: overcast in vivid, rolling clouds of rusty orange. Not an inch of blue in sight.

The light casts his face in peculiar shadow. He’s gazing up at the sky, too, with dread in his eyes. We’ve passed his limit; about two vodka shots ago, it was as if a switch in him had flipped and he laid back groaning. It’s only a matter of time before he starts pitching himself off the slide or laying down in the street. Right now, though, he just frowns up at the baffling sky.

“What?” I say. 

“Hm?”

“You’re thinking something.”

He tilts his head to the side to frown at me in response. “Stop staring at me,” he says shortly.

As readily as he knows how to make me fall over laughing and how to get me to throw things at him out of fury, he knows how to shut me up. And what would there be to say? 

The bottle of vodka rolls this way and that between us, flowing with the slight movement of the merry go round, its rattle the only sound for a long minute.

The wind picks up. I see sand whistle along the surface of the desert, buffeting the weeds. The light is growing ever more burnt as the sun refuses to set. I know what places look like before storms, but this seems even more ominous- like something in the sky is churning, planning. Alive.

I haul myself up onto my feet and immediately almost fall over. I must have kept better track of Theo’s booze consumption than mine. Once I regain my balance, I stand over him and knock my shoe against his. “Up. Come on, time to go.”

He looks up at me with a bleary expression. “Huh?”

“Storm coming, Potter. Looks nasty. Don’t want to be out here for that, do you?” I chuckle. He furrows his brows in a way that tells me he wouldn’t at all mind being caught in a storm like that, a deadly one, after which no one would be able to find him.

I hold out my arm. “Up,” I repeat. “Rise and shine, I’m not risking being swept away in dust storm or whatever the fuck for you.”

His eyes close. He mumbles something indistinct. 

I hold my hand up to my ear, “Eh?”

“Just go,” he says, louder. “Leave me here.”

Fuck. I look up again at the angry sky. This is the wrong afternoon for Blackout Potter; I don’t know if I can drag him all the way home before the weather comes.

Carefully, I put my feet on either side of his legs and crouch on top of him, pulling him up by the elbows so our faces are inches away from one another. He doesn’t resist; he never does. His pupils are wide, expression blank. A thousand miles away from me. 

I take his face in my hands. “I know,” I say slowly. “Sounds nice to lay here, and just let it rip you all up to pieces. Seems like easy thing to do?”

He tries to wrench himself free, but I hold on tighter. “Just-“ he chokes. “Boris, please.”

“No, Potter, time to get up. Time to leave.” I brush away a few loose tears with my knuckles. “I’ll help, okay? I’ll follow you.”

All of a sudden, his eyes change. Still crying, he fixes me with a heavy, lucid gaze.

“No, you won’t,” he whispers.

My breath catches; I don’t know how to respond, since he’s obviously wrong, but something within me twinges to hear him say it, something like shame. Without thinking, I press our foreheads together. 

He doesn’t smell the way he normally does, like dog and cigarettes and pool chemicals and things most people avoid but we have come to live in. He doesn’t smell like anything at all. 

His breaths are labored, mingling with mine in the shrinking space between us. If this was a normal night, we’d get home and reach for each other as soon as the bedroom door shut- simple rules: no talking, no kissing, no discussing later- but I don’t feel that kind of want right now, from either of us.

I pull away, aware that his head moves, trails after me for a few inches, like he wasn’t ready to let go. Impulsively, I touch my lips to his cheekbone, right below his glasses. Just for a moment.

“Home, Potter,” I say as firmly as I can. He nods, his eyes shut tightly again.

I stand up, hold out my arms for him to grab. His hands are clammy, but I pull him up to his feet, only for him to collapse into me; I grab him by the armpits before he hits the ground. “Potter?”

A whistling in the distance, growing louder by the second. 

I hold his face again, “Look at me, Theo,” I insist. I hate feeling afraid. He brings it out in me; I’ve faced venomous snakes that scare me less than he does sometimes. Thankfully he straightens out, wobbly and clutching onto my elbow, but standing.

I point us towards home, but then the whistling is growing to a dull roar. Turning to the sound, my blood runs cold as a wall of dust and smoke barrels towards us across the desert.

I pivot back to him frantically, about to drag him kicking and screaming if I have to, and he begins to cough- wet and loud, not the cough of a fifteen year old drunk on a playground; the sound of someone dying.

Caught between the two crises, I freeze. “Theo-”

The moment before the wall of dust collides with us, I feel a warm spray of blood splatter onto my face.

And instead of a storm roaring around our ears, I feel a quick gust of hot wind, debris swirling, and then- nothing.

I wake up and all I can hear is my own breath, shallow and thin. Other than that, it’s as if I’m floating through space. None of my senses seem to be working the way that they should.

No. I’m on my back. I feel the floor, solid and smooth beneath me. I squeeze my eyes shut, open them, twice, three times. Shapes begin to emerge from the haze.

No playground, no windy desert. The sky is above me, dark and full of stars. A half moon shines down, cutting through a cloud of fog. I’m in a building, or what used to be one, but the ceiling is completely gone, as if God had strolled by and plucked the roof off like a flower off its stem. The walls are ragged and splintered at the top; it wasn’t a happy parting. 

Thick smoke and specks of dust fly through the air, not fog. I can still feel the warm, sticky blood that covers my face and neck, beginning to dry. There’s a dull ache running through every inch of me, but I force myself to sit up and look around. 

I immediately have a distinct, ineffable feeling that I have been in this room before. It’s living, like the clouds had been. The air of familiarity is personal. I know this room. I know what it wants and what it hates like I would an unsavory relative. Yet I know also, somehow, that I have never been here, not once. 

But I did see it on television.

The gallery lays before me in pieces; huge chunks of concrete lay about, dusted white from fallen plaster. The air, hard to breathe through the smoke and dust, swirls unnaturally around piles of drywall, splintered wood, and what look as if they might be limbs- splayed out akimbo, eeking red. The moonlight from above gives it all a horrible, beautiful glow.

How _do_ I know this place, this museum? When I rack my brain, all I recall is leaning over a fake chrome counter, the taste of burnt coffee in my mouth, and a woman pointing limply to my throat. _You get in a fight?_

“Boris?”

My head snaps around. Yes, I know this place. He told me about it.

I hear my name again, louder. Sirens blare through my head, telling me _danger, danger!_ I stand up and try to spot him, but the air is too hazy to make out much of anything. “Theo?” Impatiently, I drop to my knees and start sifting through bits of concrete, charred picture frames, and something that looks like it might be part of Xandra’s favorite kitchen chair.

I instruct him to keep talking so I can find him, but he isn’t obliging. Shouting his name with increasing panic, time seems to slow as I search. I search for what feels like an hour through the chaos, but the impact of the explosion- it hadn't been a storm at all, had it?- and my fear for him has knocked my brain into pieces. Maybe it lasts only a few seconds.

He isn’t in this room; I feel along the wall for a door, my hand grazing across crooked picture frames still managing to cling to their wires. I clamor through the doorway when I find it and begin searching again. I hear coughing, the kind that splattered blood onto my face earlier. 

Finally, my hands sore and bleeding, all but choking with panic, I see him.

Theo is on the ground in the corner of the room, blending in far too well with his wrecked surroundings. His hair is unnaturally dark on one side, sticky and black with gore. I drop to my knees next to him, cursing, frantically taking off his glasses and rubbing the dust off with my sleeve. Why that’s my first instinct, I don’t know. 

As I do it, I find myself mumbling to him, apologies and half-explanations that not even I understand. “I wanted to go with you, please believe me,” I mutter as I grab randomly at his clothes, his hand, trying to fix all of this without knowing how. “I didn’t think this would ever happen, I am so sorry. It was yours- was _hers_\- I never should have done it. I’m sorry.” He looks at me with blank wide eyes. 

His voice is trembling. “Boris.”

This all feels a little too much like he may be dying. My hand finds his, and he takes it without any of his usual hesitation. “What is it?”

Theo’s thumb runs across my skin. “You have to get it out of here. Please.”

“Get what-?”

He raises the hand that isn’t clutching mine, and points a trembling finger at something behind me. 

“They’ll do something bad with it,” he whispers.

The look in his eyes is one I know well; the same one he’d had on the merry go round. A look of desperate pleading, of just leave me here, fucking leave me here.

I pull at his shoulders, trying to get him up like I had then, but he pushes me off. “Did you hear me? Boris,” he insists as firmly as he can in this gravelly alien tone. “You h-have to.”

I look at where his shaky finger points. There’s something small and flat in the rubble, indecipherable under a layer of dust. I do not need to see it to know what it is.

Reluctantly I let him go and reach for it- I try to hold it out flat to him, but he pushes it back into my arms. “Take it with you.”

I look down at it, its surface completely indecipherable under the stone-gray soot. It’s being smothered; I want to free it, but I know that no amount of swiping at the canvas will liberate the bird from its little chain. Clutching it to my chest with one arm, I reach again for his hand. Cold. He’s looking at me, but I’m not quite sure he is alive. I think he is neither; he’s in the place I always feared he would go, alive but not living.

If he’s dead, it’s clear to me that he died for this thing I hold in my arms. 

I hold it tighter, aware I should leave the building but not wanting to let go of his stiffening hand. I look up at the moon shining down at me from beyond the still-smoking walls.

Sniffing, I loosen my grip on the board tucked in my arms. I lay it on my knees, my thumb rubbing away a corner of grime. Bile rises in my throat.

“Theo-” I say, and stop when I have to keep myself from gagging as I clear away the dust, and realize what it is I’m holding.

Red book. Smiling faces. Democracy, Diversity, and You!

I nudge him, trying not to be too desperate, but he doesn’t move. He’s really gone, he’s left me, sacrificed everything for a fucking book and he has no idea. 

The moonlight seems brighter, but it doesn’t smile on me anymore. I stare up at it, the moon, hanging at half its possible grace- it's mocking me. Whatever I once shared with it is gone now. 

A distant rumbling from deep in the earth jostles me from my fugue. I realize starkly that I have a choice. Stay here and let the walls crush me, or climb out, through the rubble and into the world, toward the open, mysterious sky. 

I stay put.

* * *

  
My vision is entirely green when I open my eyes. I’ve woken up here before- facedown on Kotku’s floor, cheek mashed into the old carpet. I feel sick, but too weak even to moan about it.

“Are you awake for real this time,” she asks in a bored voice, “Or are you gonna pass out again.”

I turn my head a fraction of an inch to the left and see her torn up black shoes dangling off the bed. “What happened,” I say to them with some difficulty.

“You blew that pill, and the next thing I knew you were like… in a coma or something, I don’t know. It was really fucking scary.”

“‘M sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she sighs. “You only woke up when I dumped an assload of ice water over you, so if you get a cold, that’ll be why.”

My stomach lurches. I press my forehead back into the matted rug. “But that was like a day ago,” Kotku adds.

I squeeze my eyes shut. “For real?”

“Mhm. You woke up and we talked a little, but you weren’t making any sense. I was just glad you were alive, like- honestly, Boris. I was worried that you might not be. Like I said. Scary shit.” I hear her get off the bed and sit on the floor. “I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do but it’s not like I’m gonna call 911, I mean,” she scoffs, “Seriously.”

I understand her impulse, since hospitals ask too many questions and give you long lectures and expect you to pay, and if I wasn’t busy swallowing my own bile, I would tell her so.

“I thought maybe you shouldn’t go to sleep, but I couldn’t stop you, so you’ve been in and out since then. Saying weird crap.”

“And… how…?”

“How’d you get on the floor?” she provides.

I _mhmm_ gratefully.

“You stood up an hour ago probably, and you tried to leave. Straight up, you tried to walk out the door, I don’t know if you were gakked out anymore or anything. Just dead asleep. I tried to pull you back to the bed and you just laid down on the floor. You should drink some water.”

She places a styrofoam cup on the floor next to my face. When I manage to sit up against the bed next to her, she asks if I’m hungry, but the mere question makes vomit threaten the back of my throat again. We sit in silence, legs splayed out. There had been a time when talking to Kotku felt so easy- much easier than talking to Theo, when I always felt I was holding things back. She was who she was and made no apologies, and that was why I’d loved her. 

But now, in the weeks since he’s gone, things have changed. It feels as if something had been tethering me to her, and when he left, it had snapped. Now we spend our time together getting high and blacking out. We don’t talk. I don’t know why.

I loll my head to the side to look at her. Same Kotku, same harsh makeup. I count the clips in her hair. Nine, like always. 

“Kotyku,” I say, and my voice is scratchy. Probably I should have drank the water.

“Hm?”

“What did I say? You said- I was saying weird things.”

She rubs her nose. “Oh, yeah. Crazy. The second or third time you woke up, I think.”

“Like…?”

Kotku grimaces as she tries to recall. “When you were trying to leave, you just kept telling me you had to go somewhere, telling me it was an emergency, which, okay, whatever. And when I wouldn’t let you leave you kept talking about a bird, but I couldn’t really get what you were-“

I flinch. “What about a bird?”

“I don’t know, something about a bird. You just kept a-”

My eyes squeeze shut. I press my face into my hands and groan. “I didn’t say anything else about it?”

“No,” she says, irritated. She doesn’t like being interrupted. “If you did, I didn’t catch it because mostly all you were doing was apologizing.”

I look up, far from comforted. “Apologizing?”

Kotku sighs. “I never understood what was so great about him, y’know. He looks like someone who pays twenty bucks for a dime, if you know what I mean. But you seem pretty goddamn fond.”

“Who..?”

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, fuck off. The only other person you talk to.”

“What did I say?”

“I told you, you were just saying sorry. ‘Sorry about the bird’ a few times. But mostly just ‘I’m sorry’, ‘I’m sorry, Potter,” she does her impression of me. “And some stuff in other languages. Probably just more fuckin’ ‘Sorry.’”

Relief and mourning wash over me in equal measure. At the very least, it doesn’t sound like she learned anything she shouldn’t. I don’t think Kotku would take any particular issue with the things Theo and I got up to at night, but that doesn’t mean I would want her to know.

She must see the look on my face. “It’s okay,” she says, friendly. 

I groan. “I should probably go home.”

“Oh, blow me. Not till you can walk.”

I spend the next day and a half laying around in Kotku’s bed, watching movies and slowly gaining my appetite back. We still aren’t any good at talking; all efforts to connect with her are futile. When we decide I’m healthy enough to walk home, she stands in the doorway and says casually:

“Good thing you didn’t leave, huh?”

I look up from the laces of my boots, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Remember, you were talking about running away a while back. Good thing you didn’t, or else you wouldn’t have all that,” she gestures to my bag, the pills and the cash inside.

How can I explain to her how wrong she is; is there any point in trying? Kotku has friends, but none like what Theo was to me. And Kotku has me. But that doesn’t feel quite the same either. 

I just shrug and head out, abandoning my shoelaces. When I realize later that it was the last time I ever heard from her, I regret not thinking of something better to say to her at the door.

“Later.”

* * *

  
It’s almost ten o’clock, the sunlight long gone. The stars stretch on forever as I walk to the bus stop. I spot a constellation that he’d made up. It was part of a game I invented, but was terrible at. Find a picture in the stars before ten seconds are up or you have to drink. Mostly, when I looked up, I saw dicks and tits, which Theo decided was against the rules after my seventh turn. Usually the game ended up with me a lot drunker than him, counting slower than I should during his turns because I liked to laugh at him figuring out the sky. 

“Okay, look. It’s a man, and he’s leaning over. He’s playing hopscotch.”

“Which one is hopscotch?”

“The one where you draw squares on the pavement and-”

“Right, right. Why hopscotch?”

“Because, look. He’s only got one foot on the ground.”

I don’t think he noticed, that or any other night, how little I paid attention to where his finger pointed. I am doing a terrible job of missing him.

Physically, I feel surprisingly okay; I won’t be running any marathons, but my limbs all work, and nothing aches so much that I can’t see. Still, I’m very aware of the bottle still rattling around in my bag. Too aware- I find myself thinking about it as the landscape passes by the windows, wondering what the harm would be if I cut up one more. Maybe just a half.

I spend the rest of the ride talking myself out of it, which is difficult, since it would be the perfect thing to numb the disemboweling guilt I've felt since my dream. At first I'd thought it was like the nausea, that it would go away with water and sleep. But it's infected me, worse than before, worse even than when I caught a glimpse of the painting in my bedroom after he left and almost shattered it into a thousand pieces on the floor. I didn't think this much shame was possible, but what I felt texting him from the MGM Grand wasn't accompanied by his hair matted with blood and vacant, trusting eyes. I wish he hadn't told me that fucking story.

After I get off it’s a twenty minute walk from the last stop to my house, thirty five if I take the detour that will let me avoid Desert End road and the memories of the boy who lived there.

Thirty five minutes later, I freeze at the sight of my father’s truck in our driveway. The thought of him possibly being home hadn’t even occurred to me over the last few days, holed up at the Double R. The kitchen light is on, his bedroom light is off. Fuck, fuck.

I weigh my options: go in, and face him head on? Or turn around and risk something worse later? He doesn’t like it when I’m out too long. He can stay out as long as he wants, for weeks, but if he’s home early, then I have no excuse not to be.

Already regretting it, I push open the door.

_“Borya?”_ I hear from within.

I grit my teeth. _“Here,"_ I call back, in Ukrainian.

His cane is leaning up against the wall next to me. I’m considering where I can hide it when he rounds the corner. He’s drunk without a doubt, I don’t need to see him for more than a second to know. Not to mention the smell.

He looks me up and down shrewdly, and mutters, _“Good. I did not want to wait any longer. Fetch your things.”_ He waves me off and turns away.

I blink. _“...Why?”_

Over his shoulder, he simply calls, _“Time to go.”_

I trail him into the living room, where he moves to sit heavily in his chair next to the radio._ “Go where?”_ I demand.

His eyes flicker at my tone. _“The new job in Alice Springs.”_

_“That isn’t for a month,”_ I say. 

_“They need us early,”_ He’s drunker than I thought, his shaking hand tells me. _“Had you been here, you would know that.” _

_“But we have to leave now?”_ Incredulous, I make the mistake of raising my voice.

Quickly, he’s on his feet. My father is not a tall man, but he has a way of growing ten meters if he wants to. If he gets angry. _“Enough,”_ he warns. _“Get your things in order.”_

He brings up one gnarled finger and points it at the staircase. It catches my eye- specifically the fat diamond ring that it’s squeezed into. I know how that ring feels slicing open my skin. I find myself shrinking away.

_“We leave in the morning- I will not hear anything about it,”_ he replies. _“Ungrateful.”_ He, too, has shrunk back down, retreated into his weasley frame.

Without another word, I slink off to the stairs. It occurs to me suddenly, staring at the thin film of grime that always covers our tiles, that some part of me was sure I would really go- that I would really run away, like Theo and I were supposed to. 

But how many times have I told myself that? In Karmeywallag, when I was just little. As soon as I learned how to form the words, I told Judy I would run and stay with her forever. In Ukraine, with my friends. We hated it there, but it was one of the only times I had people around that weren’t my dad. I told them I would run, too. In New Guinea, at the mosque, on the last day. I pleaded with Bami until I almost wept to give me a place to hide until my father left without me. But as soon as he came around asking for me, I followed him.

I told Theo that we would run. Just one day before he had the guts to do what I never could.

_Well, I’m not going. Fuck that. I’m running away._

_Where?_

_Dunno. Do you want to come?_

_Yes._

He had answered so quickly.

And maybe it’s the remnants of that blackened, sick feeling I’ve been living with the last few days. Maybe it's that horrible dream coated in soot. Maybe it’s his voice echoing through my head on a loop- _Where? Yes. Where? Yes._\- or it could just be that I’m tired. I am so fucking tired. 

Maybe that is why I do something very stupid. 

At the bottom of the stairs, I turn back around and call out: _“No.”_

My father leans forward and cranes his neck. His eyes meet mine, flicker of warning gone. There is only rage, a bricolage of alcohol and anger and impatience with me.

_“I’m not going,”_ I force myself to look straight in his eyes. Why not go all the way, I think, and add: _“...I’m not _fucking_ going.”_

As he begins to rise, I glance at the cane by the door. If I run straight up the stairs, he probably won’t be able to reach for it. I have a split second to make my choice, because he’s advancing toward me much quicker than any man with dead nerves in his feet should be able to.

Then I’m up the stairs- too slow. A hand clamps around my ankle like iron, dragging me backwards.

The next few minutes go by so strangely, so quickly, that they unfold around me in flashes only. Like when you’ve gotten spectacularly drunk, and the next morning you look back- and your night, which seemed so vivid while it happened, is just spurts of shaky memories bookended by meaningless gray.

I feel my face smack onto the fourth step, blood starting to trickle into my mouth. Flash. Up at the top of the stairs, he has me up against the wall, he’s saying something but I don’t hear it. Flash._ Try saying no to me again, I want you to see what happens,_ is what he had been saying, I realize as I wrest myself free. Flash. He’d pulled my boot, eternally unlaced, partly off my foot when he’d grabbed it, and I trip. Flash. I don’t make it to the doorway of my room, so there won’t be any barricading it closed tonight. 

Flash. I’m standing in the middle of the hallway. There's a pang in my rib from where he must have gotten a kick in, but now we’re eye to eye. My weary old boot is clutched in my hand. Other than that, I don't know what’s happening around me. I’m not present, I am someplace else, maybe at the bottom of the stairs or in Indonesia or at the playground with Theo.

Something tinny splatters into my open mouth, the taste bringing me careening back. As if a system rebooting, everything crashes into my head at once and I’m sucked into the present; all of a sudden, I am all too aware of what’s going on.

My father is on the ground, flat, pinned down by the knobby knees I inherited from him. His face is blank, eyes shut- one swollen and purpled, surrounded by a halo of angry red scratches, from small pink lines to bleeding cuts. They’re not straight little incisions, but blunted holes, chunks taken out of his skin like someone went at him with a sculptor’s chisel. Me, I realize. 

My boot is still gripped tightly in my fist, the sole beneath the steel toe and utilitarian heel spotted with blood. 

The wounds on his face bloom out from his left eye, across his forehead and down his cheek. His nose might be broken, spilling out blood just like mine is. He doesn’t look like he’s breathing.

I think of my mother, her constant warnings about karma and God and making sure you keep the scales even always. Good deeds. Good deeds only.

My breath quickens. 

_“Tato.”_

He doesn’t move. The boot slips out of my hand and thunks heavily to the floor. Made of stone.

_“Dad,”_ I say more forcefully. He hates talking to me in English, but if he wakes up just to warn me against it, it would be worth the smack. Still no reply. 

He’s dead. I know it, I probably knew it while I was doing it, I probably planned it all to go just this way. 

A woman in Scotland once jabbed me in the shoulder with a sharp fingernail after I nicked something from her backyard. _Rotten. Rotten soul you’ve got._

I reach down and hold my cupped, shaking hand under his nose. A moment of dread; then relief in droves- his breath is warm and steady against my skin, if perhaps a little ragged. 

“Mother fuck,” I heave a favored phrase of Theo’s. I feel the urge to clasp my hands together and thank Mother Mary, just in case she was involved in this. She probably has given up on me, but I don’t care; all I feel in the moment is gratitude. Gratitude that I wouldn't have to go through life knowing I’d done it, knowing I was capable of that. 

As my shock ebbs away I feel the exhaustion return. I let my limbs go slack, collapsing onto my back on the floor. My shoulder presses to my father’s as I look at the ceiling and swallow a blood clot forming in the back of my throat. 

I don’t know how long I lay there, or even _why_ I lay there. He could wake up at any moment, still drunk enough to regret nothing.

I could give it a few hours and see what he might give me in exchange for forgiveness. But then- what? He takes me to live in another desert, farther away from home than I ever want to be again.

I pause. I haven’t ever considered a place home before. But I realize now that yes, I do have a home. And it isn’t in Australia, or PNG, or Ukraine. It isn’t in Las Vegas, at least not anymore. 

Rolling my head to glance at the unconscious man beside me, I know that he certainly isn’t going to take me there.

I sit up heavily to pick up my boot, my rib and leg and face crying out, telling me to go to sleep for a long long time. I apologize to them in advance and limp into my bedroom, my eye catching on the sliding door into my closet. I’m not coming back here, I know. Might as well take it all. 

Pouring my school backpack’s measly contents out onto the floor, I begin to run in circles, cramming every piece of clothing I can find into it, bunched up and wrinkled. When it’s stuffed to the brim, I lay it out on my bed and push all my weight onto it with both hands. Seems soft enough. Satisfied, I reach up into the top shelf of my closet and pull out a package. Small and flat, wrapped in newspaper and tape. Gingerly, I slide it into the back of the bookbag so it will lay flat against me. 

Don’t think, I keep reminding myself. Don’t think, or you’ll stop. I run into my dad’s room- averting my eyes from his splayed out body, bleeding onto the carpet in the hall- and grab his biggest piece of luggage. It’s fancier than I’d like, a leather duffel with our surname embossed on the tag, but I’m not just taking my own possessions, am I. I need more room.

From my father’s bedroom I take a few overlarge jackets and pants, a wad of cash to at least match my own, and- impulsively- my mother’s wedding ring. Huge and immodest, it’s not at all what she would have wanted, but what my father had gotten for her. He’d bought it for her in Texas, I think. It’s probably fake. I pocket it anyway.

My things, from the books to the pipes to the batik, are packed and away within ten minutes. On my way out the door, I take my father’s cell phone from the kitchen counter and call myself a cab. I decide against taking the phone- I don’t want to be fielding calls from shady mining executives any more than I want my father to be able to track my location through the phone company.

At the doorway, I stop. One more thing.

From under my mattress, I grab the bit of Xandra’s blow that I hadn't brought to Kotku's. Larry’s pills still rattle in my backpack invitingly. 

Stepping over my father to get back downstairs, I pause, and lean down inches from his battered face. I want to say something. If this were a film- if I had less tolerance for the things he does- I would spit on him and say something about everything he’s taken from me. Something about my liberation, something to finally tell him to his face how much he has hurt me. But this is not a film.

I wipe the blood off his lip with my sleeve and head out the door.

* * *

  
The bus station is grimy and old looking, emanating artificial yellow light. The cab driver had dropped me off silently without a second glance, but the woman at the ticket window is not so easily fooled. She looks down immediately at my bloody sleeve- of course I’m wearing one of Larry’s old white shirts tonight- and I pull it off the counter before she can ask what’s on it.

I’ve cleaned the blood off my face, but I can feel it threatening to make another appearance if I so much as sniff too hard. I have no photo ID to prove I’m over fifteen. I hold my breath, but she doesn’t even ask for it. I thank my ancestors silently for my strange, old looking face.

“And this is for the 11:35 to New York Port Authority?” she says.

I glance up to the board and pause. At midnight, there’s a bus to Los Angeles with only one stop. Warm sun, white beaches. The best parties in the world, and no snobbish boy to hate me, to cast me out.

Which is probably what he’ll do. I am wasting my time and my money following him, only to have him snatch the painting out of my hands and throw me onto the street. 

A choice. A life I’d always wanted, free and warm. Or one more sight of him.

Fuck it. 

“Yes. New York.”

**Author's Note:**

> there’s a chance i may revisit this one.... stay tuned!!
> 
> lets shout @ curlymcclain.tumblr.com


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